AI Summary
5 min readWhen Sam Newman was at ThoughtWorks in the early 2000s, he needed to refactor a Fortran 77 codebase where every single for loop contained a hard-coded break condition of 99,999 iterations — a crude attempt to prevent infinite loops. His boss said it would take two weeks by hand, then slid an O'Reilly book about regular expressions across the desk. Newman spent two days learning regex, wrote a script that refactored 8,000 files, and finished the job in hours. "I think the closest I've ever come to feeling like a god," he says. The story captures a theme that runs through his career: the thrill of using the right tool to solve a hard problem, and the humility of learning that there was an even better way — one of his junior colleagues later asked why he hadn't just replaced the break condition with a single constant.
Microservices as architecture of last resort
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introduction and Why Microservices are an Architecture of Last Resort** - Sam Newman, author of the definitive microservices book, states they are an architecture of last resort.
- 2 (03:08) **Early Career and the "Feeling Like a God" Moment** - Sam describes his entry into tech and a formative experience at his first job.
- 3 (08:50) **ThoughtWorks, XP, and the London School of TDD** - Sam recounts his time at ThoughtWorks and the influential people and ideas he encountered.
- 4 (14:11) **"Programming is Not Typing" and the Impact of AI** - The discussion shifts to the nature of programming and how AI changes the conversation.
- 5 (20:13) **The Origin of Microservices and the "Bushfire"** - Sam details how the term microservices was coined and how it became a mainstream trend.
- 6 (26:00) **Independent Deployability vs. Business Domain** - Sam defines the core opinions of microservices and contrasts them with earlier SOA approaches.
- 7 (32:57) **Code vs. Spec as Source of Truth** - The conversation explores the debate on where the "truth" of a system lives and the role of AI in this.
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Show Notes
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Sam Newman wrote one of the most-read books about microservices (“Building Microservices”), but he calls them an architecture of “last resort.”
In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Sam explains his thinking on this, and he’s certainly well placed to do so; he was in the room when the term “microservices” was coined. We discuss what teams get wrong when adopting microservices, why independent deployment matters, and how microservices can help teams work more autonomously.
We also delve into his new book, ‘Building Resilient Distributed Systems’, and Sam explains his three rules for distributed systems, why observability is essential, and also why it’s vital to take business context into account when deciding whether to fail open or fail closed on errors.
We also explore how AI is changing software development, from specs versus code as a source of truth to cognitive debt and cognitive surrender. Sam shares how modular architecture can help teams experiment with AI while maintaining understanding of the systems being built.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:16 Sam’s path into tech
09:32 Thoughtworks
20:55 The rise of microservices
33:37 Are specs becoming more important than code?
45:22 Building Resilient Distributed Systems (Sam’s new book)
52:35 Three rules of distributed systems
56:16 Observability
1:02:20 Resilience tradeoffs
1:07:54 Idempotency
1:15:58 Thundering herds
1:21:03 Business context and resilience decisions
1:25:51 Resilience engineering: four concepts
1:32:42 AI and resilience
1:36:26 AI’s limitations and where to use it
1:40:06 Cognitive debt and cognitive surrender
1:45:02 Modular architecture and AI software factories
1:51:53 Resources for learning software architecture
1:55:30 Where to find Sam
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